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Years ago some companies realized they can sell music online. They started selling music in lower quality formats and never made enough effort to offer full CD quality audio, which is pretty much a standard we agreed on about 30 years ago. When some stores do offer CD quality, they often want more money for it, treating it as premium.

MuseScore is a free cross-platform WYSIWYG music notation program, that offers a cost-effective alternative to professional programs such as Sibelius and Finale. You can print beautifully engraved sheet music or save it as PDF or MIDI file.

One of the most common questions I get, and quite likely the most irrelevant, is “how shall the artists get paid?” in a scenario where the copyright monopoly is scaled back to sensible levels. But it makes no sense to ask that of a politician, for two primary and two secondary reasons.

Sony Music Entertainment Canada Inc., EMI Music Canada Inc., Universal Music Canada Inc. and Warner Music Canada Co. have agreed to pay songwriters and music publishers $47.5 million in damages for copyright infringement and overdue royalties to settle a class action lawsuit.

Linux came a long way concerning music players in the last couple of years and if in the past there were only few choices for users - XMMS has to be mentioned here - well, now there are so many players to choose from, and if most share the same features, each one provides an alternative by bringing a new feature or a different interface. This I can tell, can satisfy any user's taste.

In the last twelve months, we have made more than 4000 commits, closed over 4000 bugs, released 6 new versions of Amarok, written a Quick Start Guide to Amarok, attended over 10 conferences and had a big developer sprint in Switzerland. All of this, thanks to your donations!

Jajuk is a free, cross-platform music player available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X, written in Java. I never used Jajuk before, so I tested it for the first time today, an I'm really impressed. Let me explain.

Music education is a field of study connected with the learning and teaching of music. Music is an essential part of the fabric of our society, and the intrinsic value of music is widely recognized. Human culture uses music to carry forward its ideas and ideals.

The largest difference is that Amarok's design philosophy is influenced by the current interface design theories, while Clementine's are more oriented towards stone geeks, including every detail imaginable.

One of the great advantages of using a free license for a work is that you can re-use a growing body of free-licensed source material to help you do it. But it can seem a little daunting to find the material that you both want and can legally use. Here's a little bit of my strategy, a few tips, and some sources, including Jamendo, which I found to be the most useful for finding music.

Over the next few weeks my articles will focus on software systems designed with special consideration for music composition by the use of algorithms. Wiktionary defines an algorithm as "... a precise step-by-step plan for a computational procedure that begins with an input value and yields an output value in a finite number of steps".

So here it is, prepare for some stunning screenshots and much magnificent marketing mash :-) . Article doesn't talk about the technical/coding stuff, just about what you get at the moment. Details will be for another post.